At the start of the pandemic when libraries were closed during lockdowns, the Internet Archive temporarily allowed users to loan books unrestricted (usually only a few people can check out a book at a time). Some book publishers took issue with this and sued them for mass copyright infringement and won. The Internet Archive is going to appeal the judgement.
when I was in college I had a lot of professors who would just email the whole class a .pdf of the required book because of how expensive textbooks are lol. Shout out to one specific professor who even sent me everything he had ever published in his career so I wouldn’t have to pay to read them when I was working on a related project
Authors can actually share their content for free iirc, Maybe only privately, actually.
If you ask any author for a copy of their paper, they often share it if they have time for it,